When I started the planning for Scrooge Macbeth, I decided that I would design my own set. This isn’t super strange – in the world of community theatre, at least as I have experienced it, people have the possibility of taking on several production roles at once. There are a couple that I, as Executive Producer, have decreed cannot be shared (Director, Stage Manager, Producer, and Technical Director), but beyond those everything is up for grabs.

This was my first foray into set design, and my biggest challenge in designing my set was the way it is described in the play itself. Specifically, getting that image out of my head and starting from scratch. I really don’t like how it is described in the play, and so wanted to take a more creative approach. First, a quick description of Scrooge Macbeth so you can get an idea of what the setting is.

The show opens on a group of four community theatre actors and their stage manager preparing to put on Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.” In the first scene, they discover that not only is the rest of their cast dreadfully ill and unable to act, but the theatre is also in financial trouble and if they can’t put on an excellent show it will have to close. Torn between sticking to their original plan of The Winter’s Tale (for which they are woefully lacking actors) and A Christmas Carol (which they put on every year and therefore know all the parts between the four of them), they opt to do a desperate mash-up of Shakespeare and Christmas. The scenes alternate between them arguing and fretting backstage about what to do next and the wonderfully hilarious collision of Christmas and Shakespeare they manage to pull out of their butts.

There are two primary areas, then, that need to be clear: “onstage” and “backstage.” Here is how the division is supposed to happen according to the script:

“…Behind [the characters] is a painted backdrop of empty seats to give the impression that the audience is looking out into the auditorium…There are two open curtains, one against the back wall which will be used to cover up the backdrop, and one hung at half-stage. When closed, this curtain will separate ‘onstage’ from ‘backstage.’ Characters will simply go through the curtain then turn around and reappear to move between these two spaces.” (MacGregor, 5)

The benefit to doing it as he describes is that the whole stage can be used for either setting, and since a stage area and backstage area can be reasonably represented as empty, set changes are non-existent. Throw in some clear and distinctive lighting and bam, the audience understands what’s happening fairly quickly with very little technical overhead. The drawbacks:

1. If your theatre is, say, a black box with no already-hanging curtains or rods, this is fairly challenging to achieve
2. It looks stupid
3. You have to paint a whole backdrop of audience seats that gets covered after 8 pages and never uncovered again, and
4. It looks really stupid. (To be fair, I have never seen a staging of this play or any other that does something like this. Maybe it wouldn’t look as stupid as I think it would.)

As you may guess, the drawbacks were enough to convince me that a different set design was in order. The question became: “how can I define these two areas so that it is clear at all times which ‘side of the curtain’ the characters are on?” I played with and quickly rejected ideas of using curtains to separate parts of the stage, as these would cut off sightlines for some portion of our audience and probably not look significantly better than the described set design. I had my greatest epiphany about it when speaking to the Artistic Director of our theatre, a woman whom I consider to be my directing mentor. She suggested the use of levels….and with that in my head, I was off!

I became attached (and am still attached) to the idea of using a platform upstage centre to represent the stage area. The more I thought of it and talked about it with people, the larger and larger this platform grew…at first I was thinking fairly short, where it could be climbed with a single step and was more or less a couple of our risers stuck together. Then I figured that to lend it a better separation, it should be taller, so then I figured four feet would probably be good. Then it was suggested to me that, if we were going to go taller anyways, we may as well go tall enough that the platform was above the actors’ heads and lend to the separation even more. So, my current design (subject to the Tech Director’s input) is a 12’x8’ platform 6’ tall. This is the “onstage” area, and the “backstage” area is below it.

What are your thoughts? Do you think my design is as dumb as the walking back and forth through curtain idea? Comment below!